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There are drums along the McNeil and the Mikfik these days. The quiet drums of mourning for the older bear souls I no longer saw nine years on. |
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That faint drumbeat pulled me out of California back to McNeil last summer. It spoke along a whisper last winter in a waking dream, Visit the bears. So there I was standing all too soon on the banks of upper Mikfik Creek. Meanwhile the drumbeat of resource extraction beats a renewed clarion call in the near distance of our lives, and the lives of the McNeil bears. Pressing on us, while glaciers melt at increasing rates, disguised within the economic urgency of the day. The hunting stories I heard going in this year were a harbinger of the news delivered via email just a few days ago. Additionally, I didn't take the early hints last summer on the situation I was given by Chris Day at Emerald Air Service in Homer either. That quiet mourning drumbeat was drowned out in the melee of modern life I live here far away. Even there, I still couldn't hear the drums when the larger alpha male (in hunting lingo: trophy) bears were missing during my visit last summer. Despite the largest sustained salmon run I have seen at McNeil. Leaving McNeil, puzzled that my feeling of those bears tugging on my soul was less than it had been on earlier vists. The large alpha bears were long gone, and I was as alone as when I arrived, with no modern language to hear the distant drums of the river gods with. Or feel again the bear's heavy vibrant landscaped dance of renewal in the presence of my soul. Hunters have returned to threaten anew the McNeil Bears again this year. Presently the Alaska State Board of Game has tabled proposals to enlarge hunting along the Sanctuary borders until 2007. But the buffer between the hunters and these bears needs to be much larger than it is. Current information on hunting proposals and their effect on the McNeil bears can be found here: http://www.mcneilbears.org, and of course at the BOG site: http://www.boards.adfg.state.ak.us/gameinfo/meetinfo/gcal.php You can receive more general reports on Alaska's wildlife issues from the Alaska Wildlife Alliance: http://www.akwildlife.org The Alaska State Board of Game meet on March 4th, to deliberate on the fate of the McNeil bears, and other Alaskan wildlife.
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Upper Falls, Mikfik Creek, McNeil June, 2004 |
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There is fire in water. There is an invisible flame, hidden in water, that creates not heat but life. And in this bewildering age, no matter how dark or glib some humans work to make it, wild salmon still climb rivers and mountain ranges in absolute earnest, solely to make contact with that flame. |
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Numerous eagles were to be seen along the salmon run. |
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There can no longer be a discussion or mention of grizzly bears without acknowledging the 'bear lover' and his girl friend who died a year ago in the fall of 03 at the hands of a bear. After viewing the Treadwell videos or even the Herzog film - (you might locate a Q&A session with Werner at the 2005 Sundance Festival site along with some clips from the movie there if you dig around for Day 6-7 of the festival), you may notice as I did that the wild animals treated him differently than they do most of us. And despite the fact that ol' Tim camped late, directly and apparently foolishly still on a bear trail, and while bears have never exhibited any form of revenge in my presence - nor the sanctuary manager Larry Aumiller's, it got me to wondering just a little, if the bear that killed Timothy hadn't been hunted at some point in the past. And that bear, being re-humanized by some hunting, wasn't then just out for what he could take as a fast-food crunchy snack, Tim's good vibes not with standing his essential meatier self. Conveying those laws of economic justice back to us. Years ago in another place and time I was told by a puebloan, I could go up that mountain to meet the bear, but I might not come back. The bear would determine that. Tim met his last bear, and didn't come back except as some bear scat in many minds. I was told they killed two bears to avenge those deaths. Werner only mentions one.  Gary Snyder's book 'The Practice of the Wild' relates and retells an old native story 'The Woman Who Married the Bear'. I had read this story before in another telling, but wasn't nearly as impresssed as I was with his. I don't want to repeat the story, which is best read within the context of his sauntering narrative. The story at it's core, relates and informs us of the sacrifice invoked by the gods when a key lifeway story passes between animal and human life. Which it must for both species to survive together. |
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The last day of McNeil 04 for me, four of us remained behind for a bit to bear view. It had been rainy and misty most of the afternoon. The others in the group left early. When it came time to leave, a couple of small female bears in heat felt compelled to put some distance between them and a male down below us. But closing in fast. Leaving we did not intend to be caught between the vise of desire and the desired. The walk out became rather dicey as the females attempted to skirt us mere alder snapping meters away. Down a sloping hillside funnel of a landscape to the bear worn trail of our exiting. An unknown distance from the grizzly pursuer. Our few lives hung momentarily on the slim chords of that distance, and another unknown aspect between us. |
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Two years ago a environmentalist and a filmmaker followed the annual Caribou migration from Canada to ANWR and the Arctic Ocean, and back to the herd's post calving aggregation. There is a fascinating sequence in 'Being Caribou' where several grizzly's were also following the caribou. At some point the grizzlies turned their stalking attention to the humans. Somewhat later in their minds I think they finally wished for a gun as protection from the bear, because nothing they had tried deterred one of the bears in it's approach. A light bulb of the raw paradox of their own journey, with it's possibility they needed to destroy that wild grizzly to continue living, illuminated the interior landscape. Fortunately for them, and us as viewers, a final move with a tent backed off the grizzly's determined pursuit. This left them (and us) with the critical question of how they expected to experience, and survive the wild experience in the telling without killing it. The solution to this paradox will determine if we too can live with the wild life, and they with us.
 These four symbols - the Journey, the Great Mother, the Cosmic Tree, and the Death-Rebirth symbol - experienced now in a time-developmental rather than a spatial mode of consciousness, constitute a psychic resource of enormous import for establishing ourselves as a viable species in a viable life system on the planet Earth. To be continued... |
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Other Bear News of Note: Animals Asia http://www.animalsasia.org WildAid http://www.wildaid.org Green Screen Environmental Film Festival United Nations World Environment Day 2005, San Francisco http://www.greenscreenfilmfestival.org Friday, June 3, 2005 — Grizzly Man http://www.greenscreenfilmfestival.org/films/grizzlyman.html Examining the 'Grizzly' Details Filmmaker Werner Herzog, Drawn Again to Grand Plans and Brutal Truths in Grizzly Man http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/05/AR2005080500316.html |
henley/graphics